Poetry is my heart’s microscope.
A lens over the frame of life ushering me to hover tenderly over pain without the world’s urgency to push out of it.
To welcome joy, opening to its surprises and delights.
To stay a while longer with discomfort and notice who is lovingly sitting with me, their presence more precious than false prosperity.
It’s an expansive laboratory without clinical restrictions or rules.
A hive of playful curiosity.
Zooming in and lingering over the micro-moments, noticing and naming without shaming. Zooming out far enough to sense the plodding progress within my complex, beautiful ordinary.
Poetry is a disruptor.
Courageous arms that reach into spaces and shake systems that oppress.
Arms that lift the frame from the dominant centre and re-set it to the margins; the glorious, deep, mysterious margins.
World-building words.
Worlds already existing that have been systematically silenced.
Words revealing and calling out power hoarded.
Words affirming my precious presence within a world that stamps its sharp shape cutter on my flattened dough and burns it in the oven of ‘certainty.’
Words reminding us that we are deeply and uniquely human.
Kneading the dough so responsively and creatively.
Letting it rise.
Poetry is soul-awakening song.
Rising mischievously over the repetitive, monotone chants of expectation, 'perfection' and productivity.
The resonating frequency of a tuning fork ringing out, calling me into alignment with my own pitch, my own tone, cheering on my voice to sound like my own.
Joining a chorus of voices singing ‘you are not alone.’
Poetry is a clearing in a dense forest.
A space to breathe, to pause, to play, to rest.
A welcome waterhole, its glistening surface a mirror to my mind.
Poetry whispers me awake. Consciousness raising without the shouting.
Permission to imagine, create, dream.
And we are the holders of these fierce, gentle, valuable world-shaping words.
The stories are ours. Ours to keep in or to share.
No pressure. No urgency. No scarcity. No formula.
Patience abounding.
Poetry is words with a soul.
And as I hold its words in my hands, it holds my hands in its words.
Poetry sits with us in the clearing.
-Ange Disbury, 2024
Happy National Poetry Writing Month (#NaPoWriMo)!
